The now-traditional intranet is effective, but fundamentally limited by its essentially distributive content model. That is to say, it functions like a bulletin board, offering information and functionality to users when the intranet manager decides. Newer intranets offer more interaction, but they are still limited by the model. Wikis, because of their built-in interactivity, offer a completely different model for how the company intranet could function. In this presentation and discussion, Dr. Paul Welty will explain wikis, show some demonstrations and discuss how the wiki might be an effective replacement for the traditional intranet.

1. Enabling Employee
Communication
Wikis as the next generation intranets
Dr. Paul Welty
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2. Outline
• Background on intranets
• What is a wiki?
• How could a wiki be an intranet?
• Discussion
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3. Background on intranets

4. What is an intranet?
• B2E - businesses communicating information
to employees
• Sometimes involves tools
• Usually touches on email and other channels
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5. First-generation intranet
• Passive display of commonly-needed
information
• Starts replacing offline materials
• Often file-centric
• Often accompanied by excessive, poorly-
targeted emails
• Usually fragmented through many sites
• Platform: HTML pages managed individually
• Problems: freshness, relevance, critical mass
(why go online at all?)
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6. Second-generation intranet
• Actively supplying employees with data they
need
• Often feature more benefits information
• Personalization
• More expensive platforms, usually
homegrown
• Problems: more and more IT resources are
required, performance, adoption, rogue sites
as tools spread
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7. Third-generation intranet
• Features employee work tools
• Centralize: final consolidation of rogue sites
• Unified look-and-feel
• Very expensive platforms, usually third-party
• Projects characterized by massively top-down
thinking
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8. Third-generation intranet problems
• Deep thinking about information hierarchy is
expensive, time-consuming, and almost never
right
• Platforms are very difficult to implement
• Adoption
• Maintenance
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9. Fourth-generation intranet
• E2E - Employee interaction
• Decentralized content
• Roughly parallels CGM in public world
• Technology has finally outpaced our thinking
about the intranet
• Needs a platform
• The question is: what will be the platform?
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10. Wikis - the argument
• Current technological and strategic focus
should be abandoned as too complex and too
expensive
• Let’s just admit there is no perfect navigation
• Lower-tech, more open, collaborative tools are
required to support what’s going on
• Wikis are a good choice for platform
• they are flexible enough for what we want
• they don’t require expensive up-front
investments
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11. What is a wiki?

12. Definition
• Group-editable Web site
• Group-organizable Web site
• Editing done through ordinary Web
browser
• Not HTML but “Wiki language”
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13. History
• Using Apple’s HyperCard software as
inspiration, Ward Cunningham started
developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and it went
live in 1995.
• “Wiki” is a Hawaiian-language word for “fast”
• Wikipedia was formally launched on January
15, 2001, as a single English-language edition.
• As of September 2007 Wikipedia had
,
approximately 8.29 million articles in 253
languages, comprising a combined total of
over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias.
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14. Demo
• http://www.wikipedia.org/
• http://mediawiki.synaxisworks.com/
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15. How could a wiki be an
intranet?

16. Model
• Ideal for situations when accurate, up-to-
date information needs to be available
• Many-to-many
• Decentralized
• Collaborative
• Empowering
• Relax! It’s never finished (and doesn’t
need to be)
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17. Benefits - Implementation
• Doesn’t need a lot of design, technology,
or information architecture
• Can run on most servers
• Easy and quick to install
• Low-impact on current environment
• Free software (and bundles)
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18. Benefits - Communication
• Content-focused
• Encourages decentralized content
• Helps keep content fresh
• History
• Low barrier to changes
• no need to obsess
• no bottlenecks
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19. Challenges
• Integration with more functional tools
• File sharing
• Training
• Cultural changes
• With great power comes great
responsibility
• Syndication and non-www media
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